| Fu Sheng Liu Ji(FSLJ) is an autobiographic essay written by Shen Fu, a scholar of the Qing Dynasty. This book is composed of six chapters, but unfortunately the last two have been lost, so the existing version has only four parts. They are Wedded Bliss, The Little Pleasures of Life, Sorrow and The Joys of Travel (Lin Yutang’s translation). The author depicts a true and deep love between himself and his wife, Yun with some comments and observations on the life, art, travel and literature. Though life is hard for the couple, they live it with grace and contend. From the book, the readers will be deeply moved by this couple’s aspiration for love, freedom and beauty. It is also a valuable document to understand the traditional Chinese men of letters’ life and living philosophy. Famous scholar Yu Pingbo is the first one to introduce this book to the readers. He speaks highly of its literary values. Since publication, this book has gained great recognition and is well received by its readers. Another famous scholar and translator Lin Yutang loves it very much. He is the first one to render it into English with the title as Six Chapters of a Floating Life which was published in1935. Then in1960Shirley M. Black retranslated FSLJ with the title as Chapters from a Floating Life:the Autobiography of a Chinese Artist which was published by Oxford University Press in London, New Yoke and Toronto. In1983another version was co-translated by Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-hui came out with the name Six Records of a Floating Life and was published by Penguin Books Ltd. Now this version has been brought by Yilin Publishing House in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province as one of the works of the Library of Chinese Classics. Owing to the introduction of Yilin Publishing House, Chinese readers can access to Lin Yutang’s translated version and Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-hui’s translated version easily which provides the possibility for the contrastive study of the different translated versions.Since Lin Yutang’s version came out, researchers in the translation studies have conducted a lot of studies on this version of FSLJ from different angles of which the study of the translator’s subjectivity has become the highlight recently. A great number of scholars have carried out their studies from different perspectives such as traditional translation theories and post-modern translation theories which have yielded encouraging results but in the meanwhile due to the problematic issues of these theories, the study of the translator’s subjectivity is very likely to fall into the pitfall of "Translator Centralism"(Chen Daling,2004)With the shift of subjectivity to inter-subjectivity in western philosophy and literature criticism, inter-subjectivity has become a hot topic in translation studies. From the perspective of inter-subjectivity, the source text author, the translator and the target readers are subjects in translation activity. Translation activity is seen as a communication between or among subjects. The format is "the source text author—the text—the translator,""the translator—the translated text—the target readers". As the translator is not the only subject involved in the translation process, his employment of subjectivity is not indefinite instead his subjectivity is bound to be restricted by the other two subjects, therefore the study of subjectivity can not be realized without the research of the inter-subjectivity. The translator should take his initiative to respect to the source text author and the target readers. As conflicts do exist in the communicative process, the translator should decide which side he favors more in mediating the inter-subjective relations between the source text author and the target readers.As the popularity of Fu Sheng Liu Ji at home and abroad is attributed not only to the romantic story of the couple, but also to the translators’successful mediation of inter-subjective relations between the source text author and the target readers, so the author of this paper attempts to explore the differences of the translators’employment of subjectivity’s under the framework of the inter-subjectivity by comparing how they displayed their subjectivity in two different translated versions of FSLJ. The research of the translators’ subjectivity is mainly carried out from the linguistic and cultural perspectives in this paper.163corpuses are collected among which75items are linguistic ones and88are cultural items. The actual usage of corpuses in this paper is48items of which21are linguistic ones and the rest belong to the cultural ones. The aim of this research is to prove that the translator’s subjectivity is bounded by the source text author and the target readers and provides a new insight on the research of the translator’s subjectivity. |
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